Introduction

Epstein's La Lyrosophie (1922) is a companion piece to his La Poésie d’aujourd’hui, un nouvel état d’intelligence (1921). Although La Lyrosophie only skirts the question of the cinema, its philosophical speculations serve as the armature upon which he constructs his film theory. In La Lyrosophie, Epstein claims that the general intellectual fatigue that follows from the speed and telescoping of space in modern life, and a concomitant increase in the speed of thought, contributes to a mode of subjectivity he calls lyrosophie. In the lyrosophical mode, the enervation of the control of reason over the subconscious elicits the projection of subconscious sentiment onto the conscious intellectual plane. As aesthetic pleasure is a function of – and analogous to – the stimulation of subconscious emotional associations, themselves ineffable, what is elaborated is a theory of poetic language in which the sign, independent of the reader's wholly subjective projection of beauty upon it, is aesthetically inexpressive. But in poetry, in which fresh, disjunctive metaphors reign, and in play, in which words also function as autonomous sounds, thus destabilizing language itself, the aesthetic becomes a genuine possibility. Epstein conceives of the aesthetic effect of cinematic representation in terms analogous to that produced and experienced in the lyrosophical mode: it is a function of the investment of objects with an intensified sense of life via their position in an atemporal nexus of the viewer's subconscious emotional associations.

– Katie Kirtland

Excerpts from La Lyrosophie [1922]

Translated by Christophe Wall-Romana

[Jean Epstein, La Lyrosophie, 4th ed. (Paris: Éditions de La Sirène, 1922), pp. 16-20, 31-35, 45-46, 74-77, and 181-182.]

The Scientific Order Opposed to Feeling

[…]

All the sciences thus endeavor to constitute for themselves a proper domain from which feeling and its logic are banned. The more exact the science, the stricter the banishment. The reasons for this rigorous exclusion are easily understandable. Any science, any logic, any knowledge rests in the last analysis on the evidence [évidence]. Any proof at its crucial point appeals to the evidence. General geometry rests on Euclid's postulate, which is evidence incarnate. Evidence, it stands to reason and almost by definition, is indemonstrable. To demonstrate it would mean to state an argument more evident yet, which would consequently be singularly obvious [évident]; and this would therefore destroy evidence.